Anti-teaching and open teaching

There are some very interesting posts about teaching over at the Savage Minds anthropology group blog. Michael Wesch is introducing his concept of “anti-teaching” and trying to engage his students in new ways to make basic anthropological theory more accessible. It sounds extremely intriguing.

Furthermore, anthropologist Christopher Kelty has introduced the Connexions project which he has been working with at Rice University. It is a knowledge base built on Open Source principles where everyone can request an account and add their own modules and nuggets of academic thought and teaching.

Both of these initiatives are leading the way in rethinking the way education and teaching works, and having spent most of my life being taught, this is the sort of thing that I’ve been missing all along. Wesch talks about being inspired by the book “Teaching As a Subversive Activity” – I’ll have to look out for that one..